About The Traders Lab
The trading nerd who goes back and checks, and the free research that comes out of it.
I'm James H. Somewhere along the line people started calling me the friendly neighborhood trading nerd, and honestly, I stopped fighting it a while ago.
Here's what got me into this in the first place. Turn on any financial channel and you'll find somebody confident pointing at something that sounds exactly right. Rates are doing this, so that sector is next. The chart made a shape, so here comes the move. It sounds good. A lot of it doesn't work, and almost nobody ever goes back to check whether it did.
So that's what I do. I go back and check.
We keep just under twelve million days of price history, every day for nearly two thousand companies going back to 1999, and the questions get run against all of it. Not "does this sound smart." Just: the last time this exact thing happened, what came next, and how often, and how bad was it when it went wrong.
The answers are usually boring. Occasionally one of them is wonderful. And here's the part that took me a while to accept: the good ones almost never sound like the marketing.
What you'll find here
The candlestick setups that held up when we tested them, one story at a time, with the real chart for every example. If you're new, start with the three that made it.
What you can have for free
The guide. Highest Performing Candlestick Patterns has the exact rules for all three setups, and a checklist you can run on any free chart in a few minutes after the close.
The scanner. Every evening after the close it checks all three setups on the 100 largest US stocks and on SPY, QQQ and IWM, and shows you each one only on the stocks where it has worked before. You can try it free.
Try the Candlestick Pattern Scanner free
James H
Your Friendly Neighborhood Trading Nerd
The Traders Lab publishes research and education only, and nothing here is investment advice. Trading involves substantial risk of loss, and past performance, including backtests, does not guarantee future results. C311 LLC d/b/a The Traders Lab is at 6375 Penn Ave, Ste B PMB 1260, Pittsburgh, PA 15206, and you can reach us at research@thetraderslab.io. Our terms and privacy policy are on the main site.